House is Right

House Recap: Episode 4.03 - ‘97 Seconds’

by Lynn on October 9th, 2007

The show began with a wheelchair-bound man with his support dog crossing a street, when he seemed to pass out. The dog tried to wake him, but couldn’t. Drivers all rushed to see about him.

Next, we saw the new herd of doclings sitting unattended in the lecture room at 4:00 pm and wondering where House was.

The manipulative woman (Anne Dudek’s character) said that he had promised to be there at 3:00 and she was going home. On her way out, the Mormon doctor (Edi Gathegi’s character) told the others not to follow her because she had “Pied Pipered” nine people right out of a job the week before. Just then, House walked in.

House handed his cane to the woman who had been on her way out asking her if she “would mind holding my metaphor for a minute.” Then he tossed folders to the docs and started to brief them on the new patient.

He split them into two teams, the ones whose genitals “dangled” and the ones with ones that are “aesthetically pleasing.” (The boys against the girls.) The manipulative woman asked to switch to the men’s team. They didn’t want her.

The women wanted to figure out House to know what he was wanting from them.

The guys decided to run tons of tests…the brute force method.

In the ER, Cameron was rushing around seeing to patients when the manipulative woman started asking her questions. Cameron asked her why she was bugging her. She told her that House was making patient care into a game and that somebody could die. (She was a tattle-tale…House hates that…)

House walks into an exam room in the clinic to find a patient with cuts all over him and an arm in a cast. The guy got up and pulled a knife and stuck it into the light socket, stopping his own heart. When he fell to the floor House called for a crash cart and told them, “I didn’t do it.” (Who else would that happen to…?)

In the handicapped patient’s room, the Olivia Wilde character gave him some pills to get rid of a parasite she suspected that he had picked up in Thailand during a recent trip there.

Suddenly, the men burst into the room and started asking him what she was doing and taking samples for tests.

House walked into Cuddy’s office, sat down and just sat there looking sullen. She asked him why he was there and he said his own office was being used by his teams. She scolded him by saying that he couldn’t make a competition out of patient care.

House: Without competition, we’d still be single-cell organisms.

Cuddy: What would happen if I shut down this game?

House: I’d fire them all, get 40 new fellowship applicants and start the game all over again. He walked back out.

Then we saw Foreman with his own team and they were brainstorming about a different patient. The team came up with a theory and Foreman told them they had done a great job. (So different from House.)

House and Wilson were sitting in the cafeteria and House was playing with the knife the patient had used in the socket.

Wilson was telling House that he liked the idea of the teams working on the case. House wasn’t listening.

Wilson: Interestingly, the rain in Spain doesn’t fall on the plane all that much. (House ignores him)

House: Why would a person put their internal organs on a Skillet, just to get attention?

Wilson: Go ask him.

House: That would be cheating.

The Dudek character went into the room with the men’s team and told them that the reason she wanted on their team was because they were idiots. If she could get rid of the women, she could get the job and so could two of them. They let her stay. (LOL!)

She went to the patient and told him that they were going to try letting bugs bite him, then they could test the bugs. He started to choke and had to have a breathing tube inserted. The dog was barking for him to get help. (The dog’s adorable!)

Back in the lecture hall, House continued to harass and abuse the new docs. The women’s team came up with a theory and rushed out to try it. The men were told to stay because House wanted to abuse them more. He told them they were in the penalty box for wasting time.

House was in the room with the patient who tried to fry himself. The man told him that he hadn’t been trying to commit suicide; he had been trying to repeat the 97 second near-death experience he had after a recent car accident. House told him it was all silliness, but the man said that it was much bigger then drugs or chemicals. House left the room.

The men were brainstorming about things in House’s office when # 6 or #9 noticed that there was a camera and microphone on House’s computer. Dudek’s character crawled out of the room and into Wilson’s office on her way to the room where the women were doing a test with the patient. She grabbed the controls and turned them way up.

Number 13 (Olivia Wilde’s character) was briefing House on the patient when he called a “tribal counsel”, complete with Bunsen burner torches. (LOL!! I love it!)

Dudek burst into the room with a CT scan to show House. She had been wrong on her diagnosis. House fired all the men.

Dudek took the CT scan to Chase and showed it to him while he was scrubbing in for surgery. He said that House wasn’t wrong. She had been fired, so she had lost her lab privileges, so she manipulated Chase into running some tests for her.

She went to the patient’s room to draw some blood and it came out green. He asked her what it means and she told him it meant that she wasn’t fired.

Then we saw all of both teams in the lecture room with House. #6 / 9 asked House if they were officially un-fired. House ignored him.

The patient’s kidneys were failing and House sent them off to run more tests.

House confronted Chase in the hall about running tests for a person who isn’t on staff and Chase blew him off and left. Cameron told House that she likes Chase better like that and she followed him.

Next, Cuddy confronts House about booking an OR to remove the patient’s right eye.

House yelled: “Hey Wilson! I’m gonna cut some cripple’s eye out, want to come watch?”

Wilson emerged from his office and said: “Good times.”

In the patient’s room, Wilson breaks the news to the patient that he has cancer and that’s why his eye has to be removed.

Patient: Cancer. What else can God throw at me?

House: Hail, locusts, smiting of the first-born. It all depends on how evil you’ve been.

The patient said that if the surgery to remove the eye and then radiation would only buy him a few more months, he rather just get it over with. He had been trapped in a useless body for so long that he’d rather be able to get out.

House fumed about there being nothing else but just the present and Wilson asked him to stop. Wilson & House left the room.

Wilson: You can’t let a dying man take solace in his beliefs.

House: His beliefs are stupid.

Wilson: Everybody lies. Some for good reasons, some for bad. This would have been a fantastic reason to lie.

House, extending a hand toward Wilson: Hi, Greg House.

Wilson: Why couldn’t you just let him have his fairy tale? If it gives him comfort to imagine beaches, loved ones and life outside a wheelchair…

House: Are there 72 virgins too?

Wilson: It’s over; he’s got days, maybe hours left. What pain does it cause you if he spends the time with a peaceful smile? What sick pleasure do you get from making damn sure he’s filled with fear and dread?

House: He’s making a decision based on a lie. Misery’s better then nothing.

Wilson: You don’t know there’s nothing. You haven’t been there.

House: Oh, God, I’m tired of that argument. I don’t have to go to Detroit to know that it smells.

Wilson: Yes. Detroit…the afterlife…same thing. (He walked away.)

House went to look in on the 97 second fellow, then went to his office to think.

Meanwhile, Foreman’s team had been wrong about a diagnosis and when Foreman wanted to treat for a rare disease; his supervisor shot him down and told him to treat for the most common thing. He violated her orders and did the treatment anyway. (I guess House taught him well, after all.)

Dudek said that House had just paged her. As she walked to his office, she saw a flash and walked in to see that House had put the same knife into a light socket and was lying unconscious on the floor. (He wanted to see if there was something else…)

Then we saw the doclings in the lecture room and Wilson told them that House had burned his hand pretty badly and that his heart had stopped for nearly a minute but Dudek’s character had started it again with CPR. (They all shot her a dirty look for getting closer to getting the job…)

House was lying in bed and Wilson told him he was an idiot and that he could have killed himself.

House: That was the whole idea.

Wilson: You wanted to kill yourself?

House: I wanted to nearly kill myself.

House asked to talk to the 97 second guy, but Wilson told him that he had died. Electrocution plus massive internal injuries had done him in.

Wilson: Just looking at you hurts. I’m going to order up some extra pain meds.

House: I love you.

In his room, the patient asked for his dog. #13 picked up the dog and put him on the bed. He asked her to put his hand on the dog’s head for him. The dog whimpered in sympathy. The patient told the dog, “Don’t worry, I’m not scared.” Then he died.

(Am I the only one who cried here?)

Dudek’s character told House that the patient was dead. He unhooked everything to go see the patient.

House went to the patient’s room. HE told the doclings that they needed to figure out what had been wrong. Just then #13 noticed that the dog was dead too. House noticed that the patient hadn’t taken his meds for what they had finally figured out was wrong. Instead, the dog had eaten them and it had killed the dog.

Cuddy was upset and told House that the patient was dead and it had been House’s fault.

Meanwhile, Foreman had saved his patient, but since he had disobeyed direct orders, he was fired. (Leaving him free to come back to Princeton-Plainsboro…)

In the morgue, House walked in to find #13 (I sure wish they would give these people real names…) blaming herself for the patient’s death and going over every detail in her mind about where things went wrong.

House told her that he had fired all the rest of her team except her and he knew that she wouldn’t let anything else like that happen again. Then he told her that he would see her the next day. And he covered up the patient and told him “I told you so.”

What a full episode!! So much packed into one hour! I liked it and loved getting to know some of the docs better. Is it bad that I don’t like Dudek’s character? Am I not supposed to?

I really do like #6/9 and #13 a lot, though.

What do you think of the new docs now? How did you like this episode? Leave a comment to share your thoughts!

tv, Television, house tv, House, Omar Epps, jennifer morrison, robert sean leonard, Lisa Edelstein, jesse spencer, hugh laurie, Olivia Wilde, Kal Penn, Peter Jacobson, Anne Dudek, Edi Gathegi

Share This

Related Stories

• House, M.D. Recap: 1-3-06
• House Season #3 Episode List
• House Season 3 Premiere Promo
• House Season #2 Episode List
• Back-to-Back House Starts Tonight

POSTED IN: Anne Dudek, Edi Gathegi, House Recaps, House Thoughts, Hugh Laurie, Jennifer Morrison, Jesse Spencer, Kal Penn, Lisa Edelstein, Olivia Wilde, Omar Epps, Peter Jacobson, Robert Sean Leonard